“Cabotage” missions are typically offshore missions for which the operator or the pilot of the aircraft must take in several oil platforms so as to load or unload personnel and/or freight and to refuel if appropriate.
Currently, methods and systems for aiding the management of aircraft multi-destination flight plans proposed consist in constructing successive flight plans, formulated as the mission advances, the last flight plan undergoing formulation being designed to service just the next destination.
For example, patent application FR 2904448 A1 describes a method and a system for aiding the management of successive flights of an aircraft, each flight being carried out by a particular flight plan which comprises waypoints. For each following flight Vn+1, the system and method, described in document FR 2904448 A1, are configured to use automatically as initial data, at least certain recorded values of characteristic parameters of the destination point of the previous flight Vn, to determine the values of the various characteristic parameters relating to the said following flight Vn+1 from the origin point of the following flight up to the destination point of the following flight Vn+1.
Thus, during each touchdown, the crew and the pilot more particularly must construct and verify a new flight plan to reach the next destination.
This solution is constrained by the configurations of current FMS flight management systems which are limited to the management of a flight plan comprising a single departure airport, a set of legs and a single destination. This proposed current flight plan structure is not at present suitable for “cabotage” missions where the aircraft must, during the flight, service several touchdown points.
The solution described in document FR 2904448 A1, consisting in constructing successive flight plans, exhibits several drawbacks:
it does not make it possible to obtain the predictions for flight time and fuel consumption over the whole of a mission including touchdown points other than the current touchdown point;
it does not enable fine and optimal planning of the schedules of arrivals at the various touchdown points serviced and the possible refuelling operations;
it manages only two flight plans, having regard to the fact that the systems themselves comprise a limited number of flight plans (an active flight plan and one to three secondary flight plans), for reasons of RAM/ROM (Random Access Memory/Read Only Memory) memory size;
it monopolizes the secondary flight plan, normally dedicated to strategic modifications;
it does not enable effective insertion or deletion of intermediate destinations;
in spite of a certain automation afforded by the FMS for the integration of data of the previous flight, the construction of the following flight plan to reach the next destination leaves a still appreciable workload for the crew during the remaining successive touchdown phases to be accomplished after reaching the next destination;
the preparation of successive flight plans increases the necessary time spent on the ground.
The technical problem is to provide a method and a system for aiding the management of a single multi-destination flight plan of an aircraft which mitigate one or more of the aforementioned drawbacks.
The main technical problem is to provide a method and a system for aiding the management of a multi-destination flight plan of an aircraft which improves the planning of the schedules of arrivals at the various touchdown points serviced and/or the possible refuelling operations.
Another problem is to improve the ergonomics of the management method and the system in terms of display and input of relevant data relating to the management of multiple touchdowns within a single flight plan.